Garbage takes itself out ~ Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins resign

buh-bye
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Reactionaries Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The Friendly Atheist, unfortunately on the fascism-loving Marc Andreesen-funded Substack writes:

...biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.

P. Z. Myers writes:

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Of course the rightwing media is playing their sad violins for these poor "censored" celebrity intellectuals.

Sarah Haider, a longtime ally of race pseudoscience-promoter Razib Khan basically admits on her Substack that she finds trans rights so horrifying, she's willing to reconsider religion as a bulwark against those rights:

It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.

But also, the ascent of Trump is the ascent of Christian nationalism and I believe Haider is an opportunistic grifter who knows which way the wind is blowing. She revealed her game plan in a series of predictions back in July:

• Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.  

• God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 

Jonathan Turley, a reactionary Fox News contributor and apologist for Steven Pinker, claims that Coyne was censored. 

Coyne has his own blog and nobody who spends a half-second Googling his name is unaware of Coyne's opposition to trans rights. 

And Coyne's anti-trans op-ed is available for anybody to read. So what Turley means by "censorship" is actually that the FFRF changed its mind about endorsing Coyne's opinion.

I mean, Quillette, the racist ("hereditarian") publication beloved by Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins, never publishes my opinions. Am I being censored by Quillette?

Coyne's also part of the "free speech" gang of grifters and anti-vaxxers and racists who met for the Standford "Academic Freedom" Conference. The highlights of that conference were Amy Wax bemoaning the push-back she received from her blatantly racist public statements and Peter Thiel's babbling, Bible-quoting keynote speech. 

It's curious that Coyne, such a devoted atheist, had no public objections to Thiel's religion-based argument about armageddon vs. antichrist.

But Coyne isn't content to merely question the reality of trans-identity, as the Friendly Atheist noted. The actual agenda of Coyne's op-ed is revealed by the claims he found on a virulently anti-trans website:

Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Coyne's message was received loud and clear by trans people and allies. Coyne wasn't only suggesting that trans people are delusional, he portrayed them as sexual predators.

So naturally it's the job of the right-wing media network to pretend that all Coyne said was that sex is binary.